EXPERTS are trying to get permission to unlock a 17th-century tomb in Warwick – and resolve the age-old debate over the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays.

The perennial riddle about who wrote the plays of William Shakespeare has been re-ignited amid claims that the Bard’s contemporary Fulke Greville hid several manuscripts – including a copy of Antony and Cleopatra – in St Mary’s Church, Church Street.

If experts are proved right it would send shockwaves through the literary world and help save the 12th-century establishment from bankruptcy.

Academics are desperate to examine the contents of the sarcophagus after a radar scan, which was approved by the parochial church council and the diocesan council, indicated the presence of three box-like shapes.

In an echo of the million-selling book, The Da Vinci Code, the search was triggered by historian AWL Saunders who says there are clues in Greville’s writings which suggest he’d stashed a number of drafts there.

The Alcester-born courtier is himself buried in the crypt below the monument.

The team now wants to insert a tiny video camera on a long thin tube into the monument to test the claims.

The work would be supervised by Professor Warwick Rodwell, consultant archaeologist to Westminster Abbey.

Investigators hope the sheaves are in lead-lined boxes as this would almost certainly have saved them from disintegration.

The parochial council also wants the monument to be opened because new evidence would bring extra visitors and secure the church’s long-term future.

However, the diocesan advisory committee and the Church Buildings Council are resisting it, on ethical grounds.

A final decision could now be taken by the diocese’s consistory court.

Greville was an eminent dramatist and poet, as well as a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I and chancellor of the exchequer under James I.

Mr Saunders, a distant relative of Greville’s, said: “Fulke spent the equivalent of £300,000 today on a marble monument at St Mary’s.

“Yet, he is buried in a crypt below. No man would build something like that and leave it empty.

“I could understand an ‘ethical argument’ against opening the monument if it contained his body but it does not.

“Any discovery could save the church from bankruptcy - surely that is the overriding ethical argument.”